She was abducted from a hospital as a newborn. 18 years later, she met her birth parents.

Craig Aiken, the father of Kamiyah Mobley, told reporters he woke up everyday for 18 years believing that his kidnapped daughter was alive. He spoke with Mobley via Faceime on Jan. 13 after a DNA test confirmed she was his missing daughter. (Reuters)

From nearly the moment Kamiyah Mobley entered the world, her life was defined by two women who cradled her.

One was her biological mother, Shanara Mobley, who was only 16 when she gave birth to Kamiyah in Florida on the hot morning on July 10, 1998.

The brazen abduction of Kamiyah Mobley — and the fruitless search for her over nearly two decades — would grip the attention of Florida and much of the nation.

It would later lead to a lawsuit and prompt several hospitals to tighten security procedures for newborns.

For Kamiyah’s parents and family, it would spawn years upon years of compounded heartache.

The child’s paternal grandmother called police minutes after the supposed nurse disappeared with the baby. For at least a decade, Velma Aiken would blame herself for not acting on her suspicions: Whyhad that nurse been carrying a pocketbook? she said she had wondered after passing her in the hospital.

Police said the impostor had been roaming the Jacksonville hospital for 14 hours, asking about the Mobley baby.

Authorities sealed the hospital, stopped every visitor, halted buses and put airport police on alert for a baby. Row by row, trains leaving Jacksonville were searched. Room by room, the hospital was combed.

The newborn and her abductor were never found. Still, officials maintained an optimistic outlook.

Posters of Kamiyah were plastered all over Jacksonville in the first year of her disappearance.

And the next year.

And the next, and the next. Authorities never managed to locate Kamiyah — despite a $250,000 reward for her recovery, at least three appearances on “America’s Most Wanted” and a search across multiple countries.

“Investigators have traveled as far as Puerto Rico, Seattle and Nova Scotia checking leads,” the Associated Press reported after the baby had been gone a year. “They’ve taken footprints from 15 babies and have done DNA testing on two others. None matched.”

“We can’t give up hope,” a case manager for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children told the wire service then.

‘I wonder what she would look like’

As each day passed, Kamiyah’s family never stopped wondering whether she was alive.

Craig Aiken was in jail during his daughter’s birth and abduction. He served an eight-month sentence for impregnating Shanara Mobley when she was 15 and he was an adult, according to the Florida Times-Union.

“I wonder what she would look like,” he told the paper from lockup in 1999. He had recurring dreams of holding his baby, playing with her, but could never attach a face to his child.

“The only thing I have to remember her by is her name,” he told the paper at the time. “Kamiyah.”

Meanwhile, the bereaved teenage mother worked babysitting jobs between conversations with detectives — her dreams alternating between nightmares and visions of Kamiyah’s return, she told the Times-Union around what would have been Kamiyah’s first birthday.

An unbearable number of birthdays would march by.

“Shanara Mobley spends part of every birthday of her firstborn cutting a piece of sheet cake, putting it on a paper plate, wrapping it in aluminum foil and sticking it in the freezer of her Jacksonville home,” the Florida Times-Union wrote July 10, 2008 — the 10th anniversary of the child’s abduction. “Kamiyah Mobley has never been around to take a bite.”

A decade later, Shanara Mobley had three more children but could never stop thinking about her first.

“What does she like? What kind of food?” Mobley told the paper then. “What kind of colors? How smart is she? Does she have long pretty hair? Does she have my eyelashes?”

She said she prayed to God every day. Please send me a sign that my baby is still alive.

The sheriff said authorities had also made some other calls after the DNA test confirmed Kamiyah’s identity: to detectives who had worked on the case 18 years ago but who had since left the department.

“This case has been passed off. It’s been so long since this it was really active,” he said. “There’s been a lot of people who were heavily invested on Day One that are not here anymore. They’re retired.”

He described Kamiyah as “clearly a victim in this case” who was otherwise in good health and living as a “normal 18-year-old woman.” It would be her decision to reunite with her biological family, he added.

“A lot of that is up to them. The ability is there for that to happen,” the sheriff said. “Again, imagine the gravity of what she’s dealing with.”

In a South Carolina courtroom

As her biological parents celebrated the news, the teenager born as Kamiyah Mobley sat Friday in a stark jailhouse courtroom in South Carolina.

In front of her was a judge. Next to the judge, on the other side of a caged window, was the woman Kamiyah knew as “Momma.”

Gloria Williams quietly acknowledged the judge as she described the crimes alleged against her. Williams waived her extradition rights. The judge did not set a bond.

After the hearing, Kamiyah broke down in a wailing sob and was consoled by those around her. Amid the tearful scene, the judge allowed the teenager to walk behind her desk and up to the window so that she and Williams could hold hands through the screen, WJXT News reported.